After three weeks of action, things doesn’t look good for the pros

After exhausting three weeks of play between the four pros and the machine, on Monday this challenge is going to reach its conclusion. Currently, latest heads-up bot of the Carnegie Mellon University – Libratus, is ahead with $1,4 million, at blinds of $100/$200.

After the first week of play, humans were able to claw their way back to break even, largely thanks to Dong Kim. However, from then on the power of Libratus is crushing the team on a daily basis.

Yesterday, Kim and his teammate Jason Les answered a few questions about the challenge on Reddit. See some of them below.

How do you think the outcome of this match will affect the future of poker?

Jason: The fact is the AI exists, and it’s extremely tough whether we win or lose. Even if we were to just barely win, it would have been an AI that could beat essentially everyone. This is going to be a problem for internet poker as time goes on.

How excited are you guys to go crush some regular human opponents after trying to grind it out against Skynet? More seriously: how has your strategy improved from facing an opponent like Libratus? Are you gonna start overbetting more frequently you think?

Jason: Once you face Libratus, there’s nothing worse any human could ever do to you. Every human is going to seem like a walk in the park.

Jason + Dong: We are definitely going to start overbetting more frequently. It takes a lot of studying to figure out the right way to do it though. The moment you’re somewhat imbalanced there (bluffing too much, or bluffing too little) then you’re making a huge mistake.

Do you ever tank on every action to let the computer feel some of it’s own medicine?

Dong: Sometimes I have the nuts and bot jams on me and I go get a coffee so I can come back to a good situation. For the most part though, I come back to a really shitty situation.

I play midstakes 6 max, should I just quit poker in light of this? Can I not just assume that I should expect 3 bot assisted Russians per table within 6-8 months?

DONG: good thing for you, its much more complex to solve a ring game. Not only is there actions, betsizes cards etc, but now you have to deal with multiple players. I would march forward

Have you picked up or noticed any patterns/habits? Does this AI remind you of certain player(s)?

Jason: I would say a lot of the basis of the AI’s style reminds me of how Doug Polk plays. But overall I would say the style is unique. Libratus mixes it’s strategy across all sorts of actions and bet sizes so picking up reads on its ranges is very difficult. We have statistics on the frequencies it does different things, but it’s near impossible to come up with anything too concrete.

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